Word: bevans
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Britain's parliamentary Labor Party expelled its leading troublemaker last week and came close to splintering itself in the process. The troublemaker was Aneurin Bevan, 57, the mischievous Welsh spellbinder and best orator under 80 in British politics. At a party "trial" in the New Palace of Westminster, Bevan was charged with flouting party discipline and insulting his leader, 72-year-old Clement Attlee, during a debate in the House of Commons (TIME, March...
Like Old Bailey judges, Attlee and 13 members of Labor's shadow cabinet* took their places on the platform in Committee Room 14, overlooking the Thames. All but a handful of Labor's 294 M.P.s squeezed into the stifling room, and Nye Bevan, dressed in black, took a chair in the corner to the right of the platform. The questions before the court were purely disciplinary: Had Bevan flouted the party, and if so, how should he be punished? Wispy little Clement Attlee assumed the prosecutor's role...
...Prosecution. Attlee plainly disliked it, but in his thin, waspish voice, he built up a case against the burly Welshman that could not be controverted. Bevan, said his leader, had publicly decried his party's support for the SEATO pact, West German rearmament, and disputed Attlee's endorsement of NATO's nuclear strategy...
Once. Attlee complained, Bevan "sprang to the dispatch box and gave me a public affront." Bevan had also publicly chided his party leaders for being absent from the House of Commons during one of his speeches. "That," said Attlee, "was unpardonable." Attlee's windup revealed his own misgivings over his handling of the Bevan revolt. "I have tried and failed to get unity ... I have been abused for not taking action, for weakness and dithering." Now he was taking action. He demanded the highest penalty: "Withdrawal of the whip," i.e., releasing Nye from party discipline...
...among the determined were aging (67), Cockney-born Herbert Morrison, deputy leader and presumed heir to Clement Attlee, and brightly ambitious Hugh Gaitskell, the relatively young (48) and clever former economics professor who was Labor's last Chancellor of the Exchequer and aspires to be something higher. Troublemaker Bevan must go, they argued, for the good of the party...